American Crime Story Season 2: Everything There Is To Know

American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson was either a surprise hit or the perfect match of a creator with a public ready to hear his story. Ryan Murphy's show, a sort of city cousin to American Horror Story, recast Marcia Clark as a hardworking feminist mother and reintroduced the Trial of the Century to a generation that heard about it only briefly. Now, the show is returning and revisiting another tragic miscarriage of justice, albeit one without a trial at its center. Hurricane Katrina will serve as the subject of Ryan Murphy's anthology series, and he told The Hollywood Reporter about exactly what the show will explore on its second time around. "Well, it's an amazing tragedy you cannot believe happened in America, but along with the overwhelming sadness of what happened to New Orleans and its people you have amazing stories of survival," Murphy tells THR. "You have the best of people and the worst of people, and we're laying into questions like, What do you do when you're in a city and your government has abandoned you? How do you live? How do you get out? And you get out by climbing up and pulling up people with you, and to a large degree that's what the miniseries is about. It's not just what happened but heroic stories about people surviving — or, in some cases, dying helping others. So it's upsetting, but it's also uplifting." But, he says, don't expect the cast to be back; he's only had general meetings with actors because they haven't written the whole season yet. The other thing they're hoping to avoid is become what Murphy calls "the murder-of-the-month club." On its face, this is both an interesting idea and one that we wouldn't peg for Murphy. His shows (Glee, Nip/Tuck, American Horror Story, and Scream Queens) are more or less total camp. That's fine, and they're certainly entertaining, but he's not exactly David Simon in terms of someone that presents himself as having a comprehensive vision of America. Then again, David Simon tried to make a New Orleans series and precisely nobody showed up. If Simon is jazz, then Murphy is pure pop. And the advantage of pop is that people, you know, like it. So if we believe Mary Poppins that a spoonful of sugar will make the medicine go down, maybe Murphy is right and he can take a pop sensibility to make Katrina fun enough to draw lessons from.